The scientific literature on describing functionalization of hard substrates (e.g., glass, silicon, gold, etc.) is well-developed, and a number of different chemical anchors are known for hard surfaces. For example, silanes are known to be useful for attaching to glass and silicon surfaces and thiols are known to be useful for attaching to gold surfaces.
Comparable chemical anchors do not exist for organic surfaces (e.g., polymers or other surface that contain C—H bonds), partly because such surfaces have a wide variety of differing surface properties. As a result, a number of alternate techniques have been developed to functionalize organic surfaces by either specifically tailoring the technique to only a small number of particular chemistries or using techniques that are destructive in nature. For example, such techniques involve the incorporation of particular reactive groups into the polymer during the synthesis of the polymer, the synthesis of surface-specific block copolymers, or the degradation of the polymer via oxidation (ozonolysis) to provide functional groups on the surface.